Mother Goose Tales in 10 Minutes — The Fairy Tales You Think You Know Were Fixed by Perrault First

A Glass Slipper, Not a Crystal One

The clock strikes twelve, Cinderella flees the ball, and a shoe falls on the stairs. In Perrault's French it is verre—glass, not crystal. Later translators and Disney turned it into a crystal slipper, and the mistake has held for more than a century. But the original text is plain: a glass shoe. This is not a trivial detail. It is one entry point among dozens into this book's real subject: the fairy tale you think you know is not the one that was written.

What Kind of Book This Is

Tales of Mother Goose was published in Paris in 1697 by Claude Barbin. Its author, Charles Perrault, was sixty-nine years old—an academician of the Académie Française who moved easily through the salons of Versailles, and who had, in his younger years, overseen art and scholarship for Louis XIV. He took stories that had circulated by word of mouth in the countryside and rewrote them as French prose fit for the king's court, closing each one with a rhymed moral—Perrault's own term was morale, often rendered in Chinese as 'lesson,' though what he actually wrote is usually ironic, aimed at adult readers. The eight tales are Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, The Fairies, Little Thumb, and Sleeping Beauty in the Woods. The names we now reach for without thinking—Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood—owe their literary identity to Perrault first. The Brothers Grimm's Children's and Household Tales, which came a hundred and twenty years later, was written standing on his shoulders. This is the threshold in world literature where the fairy tale crossed from folklore into literature.

A Storytelling Circle in a Versailles Salon

In Paris in 1697, a circle of noblewomen sat talking around a fireplace in a salon. Perrault was among them, setting down, one by one, in French fit to be read aloud in that room, the country stories he had heard as a child from his nurse. He was no folklorist out gathering material in the field; he simply carried the hearth, the spinning wheel, and the forest path straight into the gilded drawing room. Cinderella's hearth answers to the prince's ball, Little Red Riding Hood's forest answers to her grandmother's cottage, Puss in Boots walks from a wheat field all the way to the king's carriage. Court and countryside sit side by side, and together they make up the world of this book: the France of Louis XIV, with a pumpkin coach and a crystal chandelier hanging from the same stage.

Cinderella: The Pumpkin, the Glass Slipper, and the Midnight Bell

A young woman, worn down by her stepmother and two stepsisters, sits alone by the hearth, and a fairy appears. Note that Perrault's fairy is not the kindly, soft-faced 'fairy godmother' of later versions but a figure of considerable style and presence, who waves a wand and turns a pumpkin into a coach, mice into horses, a lizard into a footman. Cinderella is sent off to the prince's ball, dances with him, and when the midnight bell sounds she flees in a hurry, leaving a glass slipper on the stairs.

On his deathbed a miller leaves the mill to his eldest son and a donkey to his second, and to the youngest, nothing but a cat. The cat puts on boots, presents the king with gifts in his master's name, talks an ogre out of his own estate through cunning, and arranges for the king's carriage to pass through his master's wheat field—and by the end has pushed the miller's youngest son into marriage with the king's daughter. This is not the round-headed, big-eyed pet of the Disney version. Perrault's cat is a calculating master of spin: the gifts, the swallowed ogre, the staged roadside encounter, all of it built to carry a man of the lowest birth to the king's own family. It is the most anti-heroic arc in the whole book, and the one later retellings have sanded down the most.